Michael “I am a banana” Gove [1] appears right now to be doing his best to privatise the UK’s primary and secondary education system. He wrote to all secondary schools yesterday, inviting them to apply to become academies; additionally, he will be pushing legislation through Parliament allowing parents to set up so-called “free schools”. All this is in the name of the “new politics” – a significant pillar of which is to devolve things ever further down: from central to local government, from local government to “the people”. Other buzzwords in this trend include “decentralisation”, “Big Society”, “individual choice”. But really, all of this is code for dismantling the state as much as possible – surrendering control also means surrendering responsibility. And in the current economic climate, with the deficit and debt we’re facing, surrendering responsibility to the mythical Big Society, or to the private sector, is a tempting proposition for any government. In the case of education, this seems like a spectacularly bad idea.
As someone on Twitter pointed out when I first commented about this there, academies were a flagship Blairite Labour policy. I didn’t think they were a good idea then either. Under Labour, the academy structure focused on poorly performing schools. It allowed wealthy individuals or organisations to spend a relatively small amount of money and essentially acquire control of a state school. For a modest investment of a million or so, you could turn one of those “failing” schools into an academy, acquiring control over pay and conditions of staff, teaching and most importantly the curriculum, while the state continued to finance the running costs of the school. This in turn allowed those newly-fledged academies to ignore key parts of the national curriculum which didn’t suit their wealthy benefactors. Don’t like sex and relationships education because the kiddies might learn about contraception or *gasp* that gay people are okay too? Easy – have an academy. Don’t like evolution? Here – this academy teaches intelligent design on a equal footing; or even that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, like the three schools run by the Emmanuel Schools Foundation, sponsored by Sir Peter Vardy. Mr. Gove’s vision for future academies is that they will have complete control over the curriculum.
Let me say this very clearly: I believe that state control of the curriculum – within a democratic society – is a good idea. It allows us to do a number of things: Firstly, it allows us to have a common standard. This is not about league tables and SATs. But it is about knowing that a pupil with a B in maths from one school has a similar level of achievement to a pupil with a B in maths from another school. Secondly, the national curriculum also allows us as a society to democratically determine some key things we feel it’s important our children are taught: things like citizenship, sex & relationships education, and yes – that evolution is scientific fact while intelligent design is a fairy tale. I am particularly passionate about that latter part. I believe the best way to determine what we value sufficiently to teach our children is through public debate and the democratic process, at a national level. Anything else leads to unjustified local variation, potentially disadvantaging whole communities where the local school is controlled by people who, say, happen not to believe in evolution.
Devolving control of the curriculum to the local and school level is not a good idea. Ultimately, as a future parent, I don’t actually want “choice” in my school system. I don’t want to have to check the curriculum of every school in a 20-mile radius to make sure they’re not teaching my child to confuse scientific facts with fairy tales. I want a school system that works – one where, regardless of which school I send my child to, I can be confident that they will have a good-quality, wide-ranging, exciting and engaging education experience and they will learn the things that we as a society have democratically decided are important. Again, this is not about taking creativity away from teachers, or standardising and regimenting everything, testing pupils to death to make sure they conform to some standard. It’s about having an education system that works for all.
Another issue with academies and “free schools” is around access. They would more than likely end up diverting money from local state schools, having a negative impact on them, while having a more selective admissions policy (up to 10%, says Mr. Gove). While initial results of this approach in Sweden were encouraging, more recently free schools have been found to lead to increased social fragmentation and segregation.
Ultimately, the UK education system is already more than sufficiently fragmented. Between public and state schools, academies and faith schools, my future parent self already has more choice than I’d ideally like to have to cope with. I’d much rather see some real effort being put into making sure that the state education system works consistently for all, than see education in Britain broken up further.
[1] Mr. Gove declared publicly on the Today Programme that he was a banana. I have a recording of it. I’m also trying to get as many people as possible to habitually start referring to him as Michael “I am a banana” Gove. Go on. It would make my day.